Bewildering genius John Darnielle thinks the best part of Dungeons & Dragons is rolling for stats
Aux Features The Mountain Goats
Updated, October 18, 7:25 p.m.: Highly relevant information:
If your favorite part of Dungeons & Dragons is the organizational stuff, that’s lawful. If you then take the organizational stuff and make it a story-generating engine of chaos that speaks to the way humans (and orcs, and tieflings, and so on) never stop changing, that’s pure, unadulterared chaotic good. This writer retracts her previous alignment assessment.
Original story, October 18, 2:25 p.m.: There’s only one complaint to be made, in this writer’s opinion, about this video of the Mountain Goats’s John Darnielle playing a custom Dungeons & Dragons game inspired by his newest album, In League With Dragons, which is itself very D&D. The complaint is this: It is too short. We learn almost nothing of the character Darnielle is playing! We assume he is a Bard, as he has spell-casting abilities and centers the campaign’s sole encounter around song—and is John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats—but we don’t get to hear how that encounter ends! And we definitely do not get enough of Darnielle talking about the power of storytelling, because this video could be an hour long and it there would still not be enough of John Darnielle talking about storytelling.
Produce by Noisey, the video offers plenty of little pleasures and interesting tidbits. The Dungeon Master’s screen is the album’s cover art. The campaign itself is riddled with Mountain Goats references and easter eggs. (If it continued, the two-person party would certainly encounter the Alpha couple, then cast Fireball on the junkyard a few blocks from them so the rising black smoke would carry them far away, and they’d never come back to their town again in their lives.) But perhaps most interesting is this nugget of information: John Darnielle’s favorite part of Dungeons & Dragons is… rolling for stats?
Now, we should mention that it’s not clear that Darnielle rolls for stats. He may take the standard array and then spend his stat time researching spells and mulling his options with regard to class and specialization and ability checks and whatnot. But if he likes it so much, we’re guessing he rolls. If you had asked an hour ago, “Hey, what do you figure John Darnielle’s alignment is?” we would probably have pinned him down as chaotic good. Anyone who wrote “The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton” must surely be chaotic good. Anyone who covers Ace Of Base like this is clearly chaotic good. And yet:
His favorite part of Dungeons & Dragons is rolling for stats!
That is lawful, no question. His favorite part is the part where you get organized before playing the game. That’s maybe the most lawful D&D thing ever. His weekly campaign is also centered more on role-playing than combat, which is the most Mountain Goats D&D thing ever. The video is a delight, that fact is wholly bewildering, and we’d really like to play Dungeons & Dragons with John Darnielle. Enjoy—and cheers, Noisey.
31 Comments
I don’t think anything could ever beat the original Traveller game’s character system.They gamified the entire process – you would start at the base age, choose a path/action like “attend university for 2 years”, slap whatever stat/age modifiers applicable on to the numbers and roll.The part that most people heard about was the ability to ‘die’ during generation. If you picked a hazardous action and the roll went against you, you died and started over.It’s probably worth noting we tried dozens of times to get a Traveller game going only to bog down in days of character gen then move to something more fun.
I played that, it was great
No. I heartily disagree that anyone who enjoys *rolling* for stats is lawful.
Agreed. The very act of rolling for stats and leaving them up to chance is chaotic.
But you accept those rolls, and play within the confines they create. Lawful.
The 11-year year old version of myself that played D&D strongly disagrees with your statement that I need to accept those rolls.
11 year old me and my friends had all kinds of rituals and observances that needed to be completed before and during stat rolls, so maybe you should have done that. (And then if you didn’t like the results, oops I accidently ate the sheet)
Honestly, John Darnielle strikes me entirely as neutral good. Too rebellious to be Lawful, too cautious to be Chaotic, but overall burning with a need to do what helps other people.
Neutral Good is the proper alignment unless you’re a giant pain in the ass.
Mountain Goats song titles, ranked by their efficacy as D&D spells: Have to Explode
Orange Ball of PainSnow Crush Killing Song Outer Scorpion Squadron
The Grey King and the Silver Flame Attunement
Damn These Vampires
Maize Stalk Drinking BloodOrange Ball of HateHalf Dead
Birth of SerpentsWerewolf Gimmick
Lion’s TeethSource Decay
Orange Ball of Love Absolute Lithops Effect
Orange Ball of Peace
I like to think that Otiluke went from Resilient Spheres to Orange Balls.
I think No Children is pretty strong too.
Not that weird. I roomed with a guy at college who owned 3-4 rule books for different RPGs. He enjoyed using the rules to create characters, but wasn’t at all interested in actually playing the RPG.
My group of gamers is like this. I don’t even know if they create characters – they just snap up rule books of obscure, vintage, and kickstarter RPGs to horde without ever having the time to actually play them. It’s bizarre and yet – I get it. The part of me that loves world building has contemplated buying the rule book for many a campaign I know for a fact I will never have time to play.
Only sort of the same, but my favorite part of The Sims was always designing and putting together the house. The actual simulation of the character after that was just kinda boring.
I wouldn’t call it my favorite part but I sure do love rolling for stats. Always saddens me when we use the standard array.
3d6 in order or GTFO!
“I’m having trouble finding a class for my new character, Silly Derp Sickly Buffoon Borgnine.”
Damn tootin’!
I love rolling for characters. I played for literally decades before even learning there was an alternative method for attributing stats beyond different rolling methods (i.e. the hardcore roll 3d6 and assign stats in the order you rolled them vs the more lenient method of rolling 4d6, dropping the lowest roll, and assigning stats where you wanted them). My high school friends and I would sometimes just create characters we knew we’d never play, when we were bored and didn’t have enough people to play a session. I’ve created characters on my own, just to cram in the back of the players hand book and literally never see the light of day.
Rolling for stats? Standard array? Fuck that shit!POINT BUY 4EVA!
4d6, drop the lowest, assign the scores as you see fit. Point buy is just a parade of even-numbered ability scores.
I was creating character sheets to go along with the characters of my novels. My favorite part was more like learning the spells and figuring out how to apply the abilities I gave them in the books into D & D categories.
That’s pretty cool. It would be awesome if you made the character sheet at the beginning of the writing process and then updated it as the character grew throughout the novel and “leveled up” so to speak. You could use the stats as a sort of guideline for some of the smaller actions they take throughout the plot. It would add a sense of realism to your story. A lot of stories have characters that do what the plot requires but it would be interesting to see characters that are bound by what they’re able to do, not what they should do.
They’re no Gloryhammer.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gloryhammer
Every Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 game I ever played, the first ~30 minutes was spent click “REROLL” trying to get the best numbers possible.GO FOR THE EYES, BOO! GO FOR THE EYES!
Wait, I thought JD played Monsterhearts
Weird, I heard from people that he played Monsterhearts? And that he games with Vince Baker, who created PBTA? I guess that D&D is more accessible
…..dude, ROLLING for stats is PURE CHAOS. Look at the White Wolf system, everybody gets the same number of points that are then allocated. In D&D, there is ZERO pretence for fairness. Like the real world, yo!
If you love dice, you love Chaos. HAIL CHAOS
Take the standard array!? Thefuckiswrongwithyou?
What is this escape room/castle and where is it?